The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for determining a coverage hole of a communication network along a road in the field of mobile communication.
With the development of mobile communication technology, mobile communication networks have covered more areas. For example, in a densely-populated city, operators of mobile communication networks usually deploy base station equipment in a uniform fashion; in a sparsely-populated region, however, operators only deploy base station equipment in areas having a relatively high population concentration (e.g., the countryside, etc.) or on both sides of roads connecting population centers.
While deploying base station equipment, various factors have been taken into consideration. During the practical operation of base station equipment, however, it might be found that the communication signal quality in some areas is quite poor and that phenomena like linkage interruption might occur. In the context of the present invention, an area which the base stations cannot cover during the practical operation is referred to as coverage hole.
A variety of technical solutions for measuring the coverage hole have been proposed so far. However, these technical solutions are only applicable to determine the coverage hole in areas like cities, but are not applicable to determine the coverage hole of a communication network along roads. Roads can include various types, for example, ordinary roads and highways. When a user on a vehicle moving fast on a highway makes a call, it is hard to determine the accurate position of a dropped call, let alone determine the coverage hole along the highway since the vehicle is running at high speed (e.g., as fast as 100 km/hour),
Therefore, it is a problem regarding how to determine the coverage hole along a road on the basis of concrete environment of base stations deployed along the road.